Time to vote in our city council report card

Have your say on who makes the grade.

Editor: Thanks for all your votes! Results are now being tabulated to be published in our April 2 edition of The Coast. Stay tuned!

It's almost that time of year again. The Coast is getting ready for our annual Halifax city council report card. Our expert judges have been sequestered, and the data is being tabulated. We gather to gently sing Joel Plaskett while a roaring fire of Ivany reports keeps us warm.

If you don't know, the report card is a stringent scientific ranking of mayoral and councillor performance over the last year. You can read the last couple of report cards here and here.

This year, we decided to try something new. Why should we get all the fun? The Coast is kicking open the doors of democracy and letting the public have its say. Below you'll find your chance to grade our elected representatives from A+ to F. Don't worry, The Coast will still hand down its own judgment come April. The average public grades will be assembled and printed alongside our own.

What does one judge city council on? That's really up to you. We look at voting records, involvement and effectiveness in representing voters, amongst other criteria. You can vote however you want, but in the sake of fairness we ask to abide by a couple rules.

If you're not familiar with a councillor's efforts at City Hall, it would be better to leave their grade blank rather than throw off the average. You can read all our past council coverage here, if you need a refresher. Got a lot of time to kill? The city collects all the minutes and video of past Regional Council meetings right here. Any councillor with fewer than 30 votes probably won't have a grade published. That will depend wholly on how successful this little venture is. In the meantime, this blog will keep popping up on our social media feeds during the next few weeks. Voting will close at some point before the end of March (we'll tell you when).

Finally, while The Coast doesn't discourage councillors rallying their fans to wage war for the best grades, we ask kindly that you only vote the once. Techno-wizards better at computers than ourselves can probably write some script to give Russell Walker a million A's and we'd have no way of knowing the grades weren't valid. So we're holding you to the honour system. Promise you'll be good?